A lot of people have fallen for a fake news report about ‘invisible art’. Collectors, claimed Canada’s CBC, are paying through the nose for the art of 27-year-old Lana Newstrom even though you cannot see any of it.

“Art is about imagination and that is what my work demands of the people interacting with it. You have to imagine a painting or sculpture is in front of you”, the artist supposedly said.

The invisible art of Lana Newstrom is in fact a hoax, perpetrated by professional radio parodists Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring. But I can see why so many people fell for it – especially having just covered the Turner prize.

While all of the work in this year’s Turner is just about visible, this prize has often featured the not-quite-there. Martin Creed and Susan Philipsz both won it for empty rooms – Creed’s with the lights going on and off, Philipsz’s with a folk song sound installation. And that’s just the tip of an invisible iceberg.

For Lana Newstrom is not the radical artist she has been taken for. Her work is old hat. I am yawning, it is so retrograde and familiar – just another rehash of ideas that go back to the 1950s. Ever hear of John Cage? The Hayward Gallery even dedicated a historical exhibition in 2012 to this phenomenon. Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957-2012 “is not a joke”, insisted curator Ralph Rugoff. And it wasn’t.

This year, Marina Abramović caused a stir when she said her exhibition at London’s Serpentine would be about “nothing”. Yet the controversy was not about the potential invisibility of the idea – it was about plagiarism, for another artist claimed prior rights in nothing.

So, given that if anything Lana Newstrom’s art is a bit staid and behind the times, it is not so strange that people were fooled by the hoax. On the other hand, what they took from it is revealing. It shows how much we hate the rich.

A website called Wealthy Debates relished the exposure, not so much of art, as of art collectors. Believing Lana Newstrom to be real, it sneered at her stupid rich collectors. “The most amusing aspect of the story,” it enthused, “is the image of snobby art collectors walking through an empty studio studiously staring at blank walls ... Some of the art afficianados [sic] actually stop and soak in the lack of art that is not hanging on the blank wall...”

The reason CBC’s joke story had legs is not so much that we want to laugh at contemporary art, as that we are so shocked and repelled by the art market. The image of rich people forking out for invisible art and proudly showing it to their friends as the very latest thing is such a glorious image of plutocratic idiocy that it just had to be true.

If only it were. I want to see those rich art snobs suffer, too. But not only is this story a hoax – it also appears to be untrue that collectors will pay a fortune for the non-existent. For when Christie’s tried to auction Creed’s Work No 127: The Lights Going On and Off for £70,000 earlier this year it did not sell.

So here’s the punchline. Invisible art really does exist. And it’s going cheap.